Anna Burns and Michael Bodiam make nuclear bombs cutesy in new series

Anna Burns is a set designer with a taste for the ambitious. Who could forget her work with Thomas Brown where they created B-Movie inspired installations out of flammable umbrellas? For her latest work Anna has collaborated with Michael Bodiam on a series inspired by nuclear catastrophe and our contradictory attitudes towards it – apocalyptic fear on the one hand and weird fascination on the other.

“A rampant, self-perpetuating thirst for gore and mass-destruction still runs rife among the mass media and begs plenty of questions about our appetite for the mystery and mayhem of modern combat,” the artists say. “Are we hungry, enthralled or just anaesthetised?”

By creating hobby craft versions of nuclear mushroom clouds using marbles, flowers, balloons and the like, the talented pair have created a series which is uncomfortably charming. There’s no trickery here; these were created in camera and are all the more impressive because of it.

No sooner than the Barbican closed the doors on its excellent science fiction exhibition Into The Unknown than it spring back open for what looks set to become the exhibition of the year. Basquiat: Boom for Real is, somewhat unbelievably, the first exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work in the UK to date. It’s about time: the graffiti artist turned art world darling may have created work at a rate which impressed Andy Warhol, but his motif and language-laden paintings now sell upwards of $100 million.

Since we last spoke to him a year ago, artist Danny Fox tells us he’s been “mostly painting and making things in Los Angeles”, with a few travels abroad thrown in. “I did a few trips, I went to Mexico City for a bit,” he says. “I also just did a 30-day painting residency at the Porthmeor studios in St. Ives again.”

Morgan Blair grew up in a rural part of central Massachusetts as an only child, a lonely upbringing which she says probably led her to become an artist. “Drawing and painting have always been my favourite things to do since I was little, because it’s a good thing to do by yourself,” she explains. “I ended up going to Rhode Island School of Design for illustration, and after graduating and continuing to pursue that path kind of half-successfully, I started making more abstract paintings, trying to separate myself from the rules I had learned in school about what would make an successful image. It’s just gotten weirder from there, although now some representational forms are creeping back in.”

London Design Festival is set to take over London’s venues, from the obvious to those that might be a little more hidden. Falling somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is the Copeland Gallery. It may be separated from London’s go-to design hubs by the Thames, but the Copeland Gallery has become a well-known show space on London’s spiralling art map.

A year ago we turned our magnifying glass on artist Mary Stephenson, who was then immersed in constructing imaginary worlds from papier mache and fake boyfriends from clay, portraying the artist’s tongue-in-cheek expectations of her relationships to come. The irresistible story of Mary and her clay boyfriends was been picked up and retold by media publications around the world, among them The New York Times, Metro, Huck magazine and Broadly.